The LGBTQIA+ Still Suffers From The Hands of Protection.

By: Tshegofatso Ramaphoko

Caption: sexual orientation march / Image Source: The Constitution hill

The LGBTQIA+ community still lives under discrimination. The term LGBTQIA+ might stand or sound complicated, but it is not really. The term LGBTQIA+ stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual. The South African Bill of Rights gives a provision that no one may be discriminated because of their gender or sexual orientation, or race, and other grounds that either the state or any other person may use against the next person in order to discriminate them, but why do people still live under the ideology that the LGBTQIA+ community are not human enough or they are against the word of God?

The Constitution of South Africa is known to protect and provide legislative protection to the right of every individual in the society even the LGBTQIA+ community. Now why should we still encourage the ideology of mistreating the community, I mean the LGBTQIA+ community still faces discrimination, stigma, prejudice, and violence daily around the country because of their sexual orientation.

Caption: New 2020 to 2021 hate crime figures against the LGBTQIA+ community. / Image Source: Equality network.

The LGBTQIA+ community is proof that the protection offered to it as the community by the Constitution is not always guaranteed. Numbers steak high on the rate that the LGBTQIA+ members face brutal murders across South Africa, and the numbers are still climbing the stairs even in this democratic era where being gay is no longer seen as a taboo, I mean most of the society have already dealt with that ideology. Many of the victims are targeted and violated in such a brutal manner that they get stabbed, sexually violated, beaten or even murdered only because of their sexual orientation.

The National Task team once had a meeting about the Rights of the LGBTQIA+ community and in the meeting, it was said that in 2021 there was an amount of 42 pending cases of hate crimes against the community and out of those 42 approximately 30 cases are of murder and 12 of rape and sexual assaults.

Caption: The LGBTQIA+ community cries for equality. /Image Source: Global citizen.

“I am someone that lives with the ‘condition’ of the LGBTQIA+ community. Very tricky for me and risky for me to enjoy my daily life. This is because I get discriminated in most cases or often be it at work, or in the society because people believe that I do not know who I am. Culturally, at home it has been very difficult for my parents to actually accept who I am. But eventually with time, they got to accept. The problem lies with the community. I feel that the media and the government also failed us as a community because they did not educate the society, especially the South African society that we are also human, just with a different sexual orientation”, Furah Mandukwini said.

In most cases, crimes, and violations, and even murder cases committed to the LGBTQIA+ community in South Africa goes unreported. Both in the police station or the media, and this goes to show that that the community has little to no faith in the media and police. At some point the LGBTQIA+ community still suffers from abuse from the police and a level of bias in the media too.

“It is blatantly proven that the media has portrayed our culture negatively, especially religiously. That's why it can't be normally accepted, and people hate us because the narrative the media posted” said Mandukwini. People in the community, especially in Africa, feel that they have been failed by the media, but the media does not believe so. The media depicted the people living with the condition to be weak by nature since the media influenced this idea to the public or the society through the movies, soapies and, media also depicted the community as people who do not know how to fight for themselves or who don't have a backbone. This was seen and influenced by the media representation which created this ill ideology because in most cases in the movies you would find that a gay character is being raped and nothing is done by the law enforcement.

Caption: LGBT Right in South Africa. /Image Source: Equaldex.

The media remains a part that plays the role of being activists of the LGBTQIA+ community and were able to mobilize and have a ruling change by using the opportunity to cover the filming and production boards classification of ‘Inxeba’ the wound as pornographic. The aim was to also try educating the society about the people who are gays, lesbian, bisexual and more. Some of the South African well known media publications still misgenders the community and this sends out a wrong ideology to the society and it is the media that is supposed to teach us about the true life of community or the LGBTQIA+ community.